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This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

OVERVIEWLinguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus: Morphosyntactic Variability of Second Person Pronouns is a monograph written mainly for theoretical linguists interested in variationist theory, diachronic linguistics, historical pragmatics and/or politeness theory. The book would also be appropriate for Shakespeare scholars, although they would benefit most if they had some prior knowledge of the book's linguistic framework.

The book is comprehensive, as Busse's data are nearly exhaustive (e.g. Chapter 6); his analysis looks at the problem of 'you/thou' in the Shakespeare corpus from several important philological and linguistic angles: text, genre, character, audience, and lexical and semantic collocation, inter alia. His study extends into a few related issues as well, namely the development of 'pray you/prithee' as discourse markers, the synchronic distribution of the determiners 'thy/thine', and the nominative/oblique uses of 'you/ye'. It is difficult to summarize Busse's conclusions concisely because each chapter tests more or less different hypotheses. Therefore, I address his findings in the chapter-by-chapter description below.

Overall, I think the book is important as it informs our knowledge of Shakespeare's language. Furthermore, since Busse compares his findings in the Shakespeare corpus to other Early Modern English corpora, the study carries import for our understanding of the history of English more generally. Busse's presentation proceeds logically and his claims are well supported by the data he presents. One of the most beneficial aspects of Busse's work is that it provides the reader with a lot of material that could lead to further research or prove useful for in-progress studies among individual researchers.

SUMMARYIn Chapter 1, Busse begins by setting up the focus and the central problem of his study, some of which has already been mentioned in my general discussion above. Through his presentation in this chapter (and really throughout the work), it seems obvious that Busse regards the synchronic variation of pronominal use in Shakespeare to be the result of on-going diachronic changes in the language. One of the most attractive aspects of this study is that Busse tests his hypotheses using both quantitative and qualitative data, the latter of which is the result of Busse's pragmaphilologically informed inquiry into the textual usage of individual tokens. Such an approach is especially important, in my opinion, because while modern corpus and conconcordancing methods allow for the collection and organization of large numbers of tokens, it does not tell us anything about the specific use of those tokens in a given text, which is also necessary for understanding language change.

In Chapter 2, Busse surveys previous literature concerning 'you' and 'thou' in Shakespeare. Some of the important works that he considers in detail include Brown and Gillman's concept of power and solidarity semantics (Gilman and Brown 1958, Brown and Gilman 1960, and Brown and Ford 1961) and politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1987 and Brown and Gilman 1989). In Busse's opinion, such approaches have generally not taken into account a comprehensive view of variation in pronoun usage, and I think that it is fair to say that Busse's comprehensive approach to the problem sets it apart from previous scholarship on the topic.

Chapter 3 presents quantitative data on the occurrence of the two pronouns in Shakespeare's works along with a breakdown of the numbers by genre and date. A very general conclusion of this chapter is that the use of 'thou' forms is not primarily a matter of social power semantics, i.e. a person of power speaking to a person of a lower social rank, which has been suggested by some. Instead, pronoun selection would appear to be motivated by the signaling of emotive stance between social equals, especially among the upper classes in those cases where the characters are expressing anger or affection. According to the data in Busse, the pronoun of choice in horizontal interactions among the lower classes in Shakespeare is, in fact, 'you'.

Chapter 4 considers quantitative (and some qualitative) data on 'you' and 'thou' according to their occurrence in prose and verse. From this research, Busse finds that 'thou' forms are more frequent in Shakespeare's verse while 'you' forms predominate in prose. In this chapter too, Busse looks at current work in markedness theory (e.g. Andersen 2001) from which he concludes that 'you' is the unmarked member of the 'you/thou' set, and as such, it has a tendency to occur more often in prose, the unmarked genre. Furthermore, Busse's data support the idea that prose, as the unmarked genre, is the locus for the on-going shift in pronominal use and that verse tends to be more conservative.

In Chapter 5, Busse builds on his research of 'you' and 'thou' in verse, where he looks specifically at their use in Shakespeare's sonnets. By contrasting the use of pronouns in the set of sonnets addressed to the "fair youth", for whom Shakespeare has an intimate affection, Busse concludes that the shift of pronouns works primarily to build affective nuance. Chapter 5 includes a comparison of Shakespeare's use of pronouns to that of other Elizabethan poets. The numbers from this comparison show that although Shakespeare's verse appears to be linguistically more conservative, relative to that of his contemporaries, the use of 'thou' forms by Elizabethan poets supports the thesis developed in Chapter 4 concerning the conservative and archaizing nature of verse in general.

Chapter 6 (the longest of the book at 85 pp.) looks at the collocation of 'you/thou' with nominal forms of address. Busse's presentation in this chapter is a very detailed listing of quantitative data concerning such collocations. In sum, Busse finds that rules of variability can be established, but that pronoun use is not totally predictable from nominal forms of address because of several factors, including mock or ironic language where the nominal forms of polite address are used to indicate just the opposite of politeness. This, of course, underscores the need for a pragmaphilological approach, taking into account qualitative data as well as quantitative data.

In Chapter 7, Busse studies the evidence from Shakespeare concerning the development of 'prithee' and 'pray you' as discourse markers. From this study, Busse draws a number of conclusions. For instance, he is able to determine that 'pray you' is the more frequent of the two in Shakespeare and that it had already undergone quite a bit of grammaticization by that time. For instance, Busse's data show that 'pray you' had changed from a matrix stem introducing a that-clause or infinitive to a parenthetical marker expressing "an adverb-like" quality (211-212). Further indications of an advanced grammatical stage for 'pray you', according to Busse, are found in its degree of semantic bleaching and pragmatic strengthening. His study of 'pray you' and 'prithee' have also uncovered a "good deal of overlap" (211) between the uses of the two. (See the Critical Evaluation section for more on this part of Busse's study.)

In Chapter 8, Busse investigates the hypotheses set up by researchers such as Mulholland (1967) and Barber (1981), who suggest that intralinguistic factors, such as co-occurrence of pronoun forms with open/closed class verbs and/or other syntactic categories, are important factors to consider. In Busse's sampling of 8 plays from different genres and periods, he concludes that such intralinguistic factors do not come to bear on the selection of pronouns.

In Chapter 9, Busse turns his attention to the selection of 'thy' and 'thine', which has often been explained in terms of morphophonological conditioning, i.e. 'thy' before consonants and 'thine' before vowels, cf. 'an'~'a' in Modern English. As Busse's data indicate, this distinction is no longer tenable by Shakespeare's time when the selection of 'thy' and 'thine' had changed from intralinguistic phonetic conditioning to extra-linguistic factors, such as "formality, text type, etc." (247). In fact, as Busse's investigation found, by Shakespeare's time, the most frequent uses of 'thine' were in certain fixed expressions, e.g. 'thine own', 'thine eyes', etc.

Chapter 10 looks at the use of nominative 'ye' versus oblique 'you'. Busse's investigation shows that case is not strictly observed by Shakespeare's time in so far as 'ye' occurs around 30% of the time in non-nominative contexts. The stronger correlation of 'ye' in nominative contexts, however, is bolstered by its use in certain verbal imperatives, 'hark ye', 'look ye' and in set optative expressions like 'fare ye well'. Busse suggests that from such emotive contexts, 'ye' had become the affective form of the 'ye'~'you' dyad by Shakespeare's time and consequently one finds it more often collocated with vocative terms of abuse and affection.

Chapter 11 presents a summary of Busse's study and conclusions.

CRITICAL EVALUATIONWhile overall I find great worth in Busse's study, I think the readershould be aware of the following issues. In his attempt at comprehensive coverage, Busse's presentation is sometimes elliptical in ways that limit the potential readership of the book. First, Busse's presentation of data in his many graphs, charts and diagrams is not generally well explained, making the reader stop to make the necessary connections. This is problematic for those readers not trained in statistical methodology and particularly in the ways that statistical information is graphically presented.

For instance, on page 124, Graph 1, we find the first of several summary graphs on the use of 'you/thou' with nominal forms of address. It is a figure with bars extending upward from a line marked '0'. Each bar is labeled with one of the forms of address (e.g. 'Lady', 'Goodman', etc.). A legend on the graph indicates that darkly shaded areas represent +you (x1000) and lightly shaded areas represent you (x1000). An endnote explains that the graph represents a ratio of 'you' to 'thou' and it explains the formula used to arrive at that statistic. The endnote does tell us explicitly that '0' indicates 1:1 ratio. In my view, however, unless one is quite familiar with this type of statistical presentation, the information given by Busse does not lend itself to easy interpretation. Thus, since the data in this first (of several) graph(s) shows only instances where 'you' has a higher frequency in the 'you:thou' ratio, all of the bars are darkly shaded and rise above the '0' line. It is not until several pages later that one sees bars extending both above and below '0' with different shadings, thus allowing the reader to make sense of the information given, i.e. he is essentially contrasting nominal forms that show a predominant collocational pattern with 'you' as opposed to 'thou'. This potential confusion could easily be cleared up with a sentence or two interpreting the data in the graph and unfortunately this is not done throughout.

Another area in Busse that is underdeveloped is explanation of his use of statistical tests and inference in support of his claims. I should mention that Busse is not unique in this regard and one finds many instances of similarly underdeveloped integration of statistics into linguistic inquiry throughout the literature. While I generally support the use of statistics in linguistic analysis involving variation, the use statistical methodology is not very meaningful unless it is well understood and the interpretations of that data are made clear. I do not think a book that could potentially engage linguists from diverse backgrounds and even Shakespeare scholars can assume such familiarity with statistics.

Finally, I think that the reader should also be aware that despitehis otherwise very comprehensive treatment, including a generally good incorporation of previous research on the topics he investigates, his discussion of the development of 'prithee' and 'pray you' as discourse markers is limited. My criticism here concerns the fact that he does not consider a lot of literature that is directly germane to his topic (e.g. Bybee and Scheibman 1999 and Haiman 1998), even in those areas where his data clearly point to well-studied theoretical constructs within the fields of grammaticization and pragmaticization, such as the phenomena of "layering" (Hopper 1991) and "subjectivization/intersubjectivization" (Traugott and Dasher 2002). To be fair, however, I should say that he does quote work by Traugott and Dasher, although he does not use their terminology or any of their examples; Brinton's (1996) work on the development of discourse markers in English is cursorily incorporated by Busse in a similar way. Thus, he does not really present his data here within a bigger picture of language change, i.e. documented cases of analogous change from other languages, or within the context of the very theories he invokes, i.e. grammaticization/pragmaticization. To have done so would validate his claims about 'pray you' and 'prithee' cross-linguistically, making his conclusions stronger and giving the chapter theoretical focus. The resulting problem, then, is that without prior knowledge about this area of historical linguistics, Busse's arguments about the use and development of 'pray you' and 'prithee' are difficult to evaluate.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER K. Aaron Smith, assistant professor in the Department of English at Illinois State University, has published on a number of topics concerning issues in the development of the English language. His research interests also include grammaticization theory, typology and universals. He is currently working on revising his PhD dissertation on the development of the English progressive into a book.